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Television: Botany's most famous garden

17 November 1990

By GLYN JONES

Views of Kew, Six programmes, Granada/Channel 4, Fridays at 9.30 pm

The further away we get from the Victorians, the harder it is for us
to dislike them. Hypocritical – often; unctuous – without doubt; and jingoistic
– by turns. But then look at the audacity of their science and engineering,
the zest, courage and confidence with which public spirited men, eschewing
laissez faire, created monuments for the people in which we delight to this
day.

A superb example is Kew Gardens, or to be formal the Royal Botanical
Gardens at Kew, that passed into public keeping 150 years ago. It may seem
odd to mention it in the same breath as botany, but the engineering of the
gardens is a wonder, expecially Decimus Burton’s Palm House, which is one
of the wonders of the Victorian age.

Its soaring structure clearly caught the eye of producer/director Neil
Cleminson who treats it lovingly in the first of a series of six half-hour
programmes, Views of Kew, which Granada TV, with what we might call Victorian
public spirit, have made for Channel 4 to celebrate Kew’s anniversary.

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Last Friday’s (9 November) scene setter for the series gave us a nicely
balanced look at the gardens themselves and at an expedition into eastern
Nepal to collect botanical specimens for the gardens and for other botanical
centres around the world. The party was filmed in the foothills of Kangchenjunga,
the mighty Himalayan peak, and it was humbling to learn that Sir Joseph
Hooker, one of the early directors of Kew, had gone on exactly the same
quest to these beautiful but forbidding valleys a century and a half before.

Not a lot has changed: true, the Himalayan rhododendron, the Nepalese
national flower, is threatened because of forest clearance, but we were
treated to the news soberly, without tantrum or hysteria, in a well-spaced
and cool script spoken low-key by John Hedges.

What came across clearly in the film was how much real conservation
depends not so much on arm waving on a platform in London, but in patient
fieldwork collecting samples out in the Himalayas. The party of botanists
reckoned to make 10 to 15 miles each day, climbing 3000 to 4000 feet between
setting off at 6.30 am and stopping – or dropping – in the early evening.
Not that this was to rest. The remainder of the evening was spent in a dry
tent, warmed by paraffin stoves, drying and cataloguing the day’s haul to
take back to Kew Gardens.

The party had a nightly clean up after day-long attack from leeches,
whose meals made ugly wounds which developed into uglier scars. Up the crazy
trails slogged the 50 porters, each carrying up to three-quarters of his
own weight. Cameraman Lawrence Jones and sound recordist Tony Cooper shared
all the hardships and were rewarded with the glories of the Himalayan cyclorama,
and the cruel, cold Kangchenjunga, indifferent in the foreground. Yet the
two pieces of camerawork I remember most vivdly – apart from the fauna –
were of human incident: the camera’s eye view looking down from eye level
at the petrifying single-plank suspension bridge across a chasm beneath
the part’s feet: and the absurdity of the British party trekking up a hill,
hidden under a cloud of business-gents’ black umbrellas.

My major reservation about this film was the lack of real scientific
content in the script. We saw superb specimens, no doubt being collected,
but we never knew why. Were they new to the group or were they replacing
specimens at Kew? Did the team set out with a shopping list or did they
pick what took their fancy? It is hard to believe that they flew from London
without some firm botanic policy, but we were not told what it was. However,
there are five more programmes in the series and the second shows what happened
when the seeds and specimens got back to Kew, so there is still a chance
to give greater understanding to the story.

Meanwhile, bless again the Victorians who gave us Kew. What would we
achieve if we set out to do it? A theme park paid for out of the bottom
line profits of a property developer.